Almost Unrelated Category Archives

No, I did not just cuss on live internet.

I’d never heard of Polyvore until I noticed today that I’d received a couple of hits from the site. I followed the link to find a Flickr-like looking site with this image:

Liz by AlexWriterGirl featuring Monsoon

What’s that in the upper right hand corner? I made that! Those are my “wall of polaroids” that I made as a mock-up for potential thesis show installations.

The central concept of Polyvore is pretty cool… images from around the web are gathered and collaged together. I’m all for that. What I dislike is the strong fashion aspect with all the clothes and things. It even lists the prices of the things used in each collage with links to the sites where you can go buy everything. So what could be a site for cool mashups from things around the internet ends up looking more like fancy shopping lists. Ugh.

Everyone needs to go to Mary Milne’s web site and listen to “Hardbones,” because it’s absolutely phenomenal.

Do it!

This book has been taunting me at work. It sits there, all blue and ugly and unfunny from one of the tables.

From the editorial review:

Cheryl Caldwell pairs lively humorous illustrations and satirical humor with to-the-point observations on life to ensure readers maintain a laughing perspective:
“I may not know karate, but I know crazy.”
“What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?”
“It has been lovely but I have to scream now.”

Wait, this is supposed to be satirical humor? It’s not even as funny as a Family Circus strip:

Currently, there are used copies for sale on Amazon for $0.01.

I think it’s supposed to be a feel-good kind of book, but I can for the life of me figure out how it’s supposed to accomplish that other than by making me say, “I could so do better than this!” Dammit, if something like this can get published and sold at a big name bookstore, then so can I!

That’s what Sarah Palin would’ve named me!

Because September 19th is International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

As a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I’m looking forward to this holiday and even this website will be participating in the festivities.

May you all be blessed by his noodly appendage!

This is something that has been bothering me for a while now…

At work, my boss posted a flyer for an upcoming lecture here on campus. The speaker is a man named Ray Kurzweil, an “inventor, entrepreneur and futurist who is a key innovator in the development of artificial intelligence and radical life extension.”

Wait! Back up the train! He’s a futurist?

The term does not have positive connotations. As someone who has a rough knowledge of art history, a futurist isn’t one who speculates about the future. No, the futurism I’m familiar with was an aggressive attempt to become the future, to destroy everything old and embrace everything new. And they were fascists.

Take one look at the Futurist Manifesto and you’ll see that there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about this ideology. Especially point number nine:

9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

The Futurists believed that war was the best way to accelerate ourselves forward. It was only by wiping out traces of the past and the old could there ever be room for the new. Cities needed to be completely leveled and rebuilt. Old ideologies needed to be forgotten by killing off those who remember them. The only way to make it to Tomorrow is to annihilate Yesterday.

You may think I’m being finicky. “Futurism doesn’t mean this anymore,” you say. “Words don’t have fixed meanings.” This is true, but words can maintain their ties to the past for ages. Just imagine someone who theorizes and writes about the importance of communities. Do you really think he’d go around calling himself a “Communist”?

In other words: I’m sorry, Ray, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to your talk.

These aren’t the kind one should be handing out.